oceanic ridge,continuous submarine mountain chain extending approximately 80,000 km (50,000 miles) through all the world’s oceans. Ridges separate the oceans into distinct basins and may or may not be seismically active.

A brief treatment of oceanic ridges follows. For further discussion, see ocean: Oceanic ridges.

The seismically active oceanic ridge is approximately 60,000 km (37,000 miles) long and extends down the axis of the entire Atlantic Ocean, passing midway between Africa and Antarctica and turning north to the centre of the Indian Ocean, where it branches, the main ridge continuing midway between Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica to cross the east side of the Pacific Basin, running all the way to the mouth of the Gulf of California. The ridge is essentially a broad, enormous uplift sloping up from depths of more than 6,000 m (20,000 feet) in marginal basins to the crest of the ridge, which is almost everywhere less than 4,000 m (13,100 feet) in elevation, with crest mountains commonly rising to depths of 2,000 to 3,000 m (6,600 to 9,800 feet) but sometimes reaching above sea level. At intervals the ridge is crossed, usually at right angles, by large topographic disturbances called fracture zones that offset, or displace, the crest. These offsets are called transform faults. Shallow earthquake foci follow the crest: those along the axis of the ridge are caused by normal faulting, those on fracture zones by shearing. The oceanic ridge system is the largest feature of the Earth’s surface after the continents and the ocean basins themselves; its volume exceeds 100,000,000 cubic km (25,000,000 cubic miles).

Aseismic ridges (those having very few earthquakes or none at all) that extend wholly or partly from uplifted islands on the axis of the oceanic ridge to coasts of adjacent continents are called lateral ridges. Nearly straight ridges that terminate at one end in a young or active volcanic island are called linear chains.

The pattern of ridges is so regular and their properties so constant that these features cannot be caused by chance. The only theory that satisfactorily explains their characteristics is that of plate tectonics. According to this theory, the outer 50 to 100 km (31 to 62 miles) of the Earth consists of a brittle shell that is broken into about 12 large plates and several small ones. Convection currents within the molten mantle (the next deeper layer within the Earth) cause these lithospheric plates to move slowly about relative to one another, and these motions generate the ridges. The oceanic ridge system and its branches mark boundaries along which magmatic upwelling (the rising of molten rock from deep beneath the crust) is splitting the ridge’s crest and creating new ocean floor along the trailing edges of both plates. Particularly active upwellings at some places under the oceanic ridges are marked by active volcanoes, from which such islands as Iceland have formed.

Lateral ridges are thought to have formed where this localized activity has been of long duration. They have been formed by the outpouring of lava throughout the time of expansion of an ocean basin and thus mark the locus of movement of the two plates away from the ridge crests. Linear ridges are considered to have a similar origin, except that in their case the source of the lava does not lie on the axis of a spreading ridge. Instead, if a single plate is driven over a hot spot (i.e., a magma-generating centre fixed in the deep mantle) from which the molten rock materials can penetrate to the surface, then those materials generate a single chain of progressively older volcanoes, which mark the direction of past motion of the plate over the hot spot.